AN: Sequel to Into the Woods. Very AU.

***

They were at the point between public approval and condemnation, the point between utter, frantic relief and the mellowing of lust into deeper, sustaining affection, and perfectly at the point where sharing quarters was both comfortable and delightfully new. For him, the mere sight of her fingers brushing over the spines of his books with perfect ease meant a missed heartbeat; for her, the feel of his pillow under her cheek and his chest against her back was the return of a normal they had never before experienced.

They were different people, but in name still the same: the Admiral and his President. The lines between democracy and military rule might have blurred, somewhat, but the melding of two ways of life was tempered by deeper understanding of each other and the society they were building. She knew, now, that a particular tilt of his head was a silent request for an interruption in his work, but that the same tilt in the opposite direction was a warning signal that even she best tread softly, both literally and figuratively.

He knew that a particular far-off look in her eyes could mean a variety of things: if she was curled up on their couch, legs tucked beneath her, she would welcome an embrace, but if her hand was tucked beneath her chin and her feet were firmly on the ground, then it was not his touch that she wanted but his mind. He had seen the look post-coitus and during her early morning ablutions.

And sometimes, he saw the look combined with the slightest hesitation in her step, and knew that she was unconsciously preparing herself for the moment when foot hit ground, when she might find that steel halls had melted away into snowy fields, where a branch might not be a branch.

New Caprica had not been kind to Laura Roslin, no more than it had been kind to Kara Thrace, or Ellen Tigh, or any one of the pitifully few still-living refugees. When he had returned to her the whiteboard, she had stared for a few moments at the number last written on it- 39,799- before dragging her hand across the numerals and marking in four of her own.

8,893.

There was one blessing, besides the obvious improvement in their relationship: a rash of pregnancies seemed to sweep across the fleet, as more and more people realized exactly how low the population had dipped. It was the emptiness that drove the point home, as civilians and crew alike began to find that an empty room was more likely to bring back the ghosts of the settlement than anything else.

There were many empty rooms, just as there seemed to be many dimly echoing hallways. The sound of one set of footsteps had never seemed quite so ominous; where once people complained about the crowding, now they longed for and tried to reproduce it. Extended families and close friends found themselves moving closer; pilots and crewmembers began moving into empty racks in rooms half-filled. The noise was encouraging. The sound of a child's laughter or a baby's cry became dear in a way that it had never been before.

Laura wanted some of that sound in her own life, as well as in her quarters. But her time for children had passed, and if Lee was fathering any grandchildren he had yet to present one to her or his father for dandling and cuddling. She could appease a certain amount of her longing during the day, when she found herself stealing moments to check in on the women with infants, or the small classrooms filled with children and teenagers. She found the presence of the teenagers nearly as heartbreaking as she found the infants, but in quite a different way: for them, the classroom was a mere formality, a grasping a hold of what was formerly normal. They had known too much of suffering on New Caprica to continue in this stage between childhood and adulthood. Gangly and self-conscious, they jumped at unexpected sounds and were more starved for touch than the normal toddler. More than one child was born from children as girl and boy paired off, and within the stricter religious sects, where sex was meant for the marriage bed, there came a bending of rules and a softening of temper born from piety.

There were, however, girls from that age group who broke the mold by turning so deeply averse to touch that socialization seemed to be the last thing they wanted, even with each other. They were not the only females who suddenly became this way; Laura knew several formerly vibrant women who had become shadows of their former selves.

All of childbearing age. All unnaturally barren.

The farms of Kara's memory were gentle and kind compared to the experiments performed as snow fell onto snow on New Caprica.

All this Laura inherited with her office. Each time she entered and exited her quarters shared with Bill, she experienced a new paradigm shift. The small set of rooms was home and warm and just the right amount of crowded, while the halls outside were bare and quiet and nearly as cold as the snow she still remembered. Had she once really wished for this clarity? She preferred the veil that the light from shaded lamps drew over her raw memories; she preferred his warm embrace over watching the barren girls weep and shrink from her touch. She preferred studying his habits so minutely that she could distract herself with recounting them whenever she saw Lee and Kara catch glimpse of each other and turn before meeting, the presence of Kara's child and Kara's grief insurmountable now that they had left the hostile planet in favor of familiar halls.

For Bill, who had long grown accustomed to empty hallways and quiet rooms, his greatest distress came in watching how the changes affected Laura, recognizing that her empty arms could not quite be filled by his frame.

But then, he thought ruefully, the same could be said of him.